Everytime I have a team that doesn't make the playoffs, I just assume it was poor luck. Of course, when I have a team that wins a bunch, I assume that it is because I'm just awesome. Thats positive thinking!

Bumped up Mr. Boogerlips' recent statistical variance post. He had virtually the same team over a three-year period and its win total ranged from 81 wins (a mediocre team by most regular season standards) to 99 wins (a pretty good team by most standards). Leaving aside quality of competition and other "outside" factors, it's interesting that one season probably isn't dispositive in terms of determining whether you have a "good" or "bad" team.

I've noticed that when SIM'ing a couple teams against each other, it takes several hundred games for a reliable pattern to emerge and sometimes the result after 500 games (about the equivalent of three seasons) is quite different than the result after 200 games.

By the way, season 3's team -- the 110-game winner -- starts the playoffs Saturday. We were first in wins (19 more than 2nd place), first in runs (83 more than 2nd place), first in ERA (0.02 better than 2nd place). Any chance we DON'T get knocked off in the first round?

?You obviously have a better team than your first round opponent although the dead-ball vs live-ball era pitching may even things out a tad. I think your team wins in 4. BTW, I checked the numbers* and that seems to be the mostly likely result of a five game series-- that is your team wins in 4 games ~25% of the time. Of course you still face a 35% chance of losing the series.

This is a great thread, and should serve as a strong counter argument against the occasional conspiracy theories thrown out about WIS embedding streakiness into the algorithm, or about there being randomly generated "good/bad" versions of a player. When you control for the external variables that are present in a typical OL, most of the perceived anomalies disappear and the player stats look remarkably consistent, as you would expect from an algorithm that is based purely on the underlying stats and randomly generated probabilities.

Here's another example, from the 3000 Hits Progressive. The way this league works is that each owner takes a player with 3000 hits and progresses his career. Each season you use the actual season of your player, but twist his teammates. I have Palmeiro, so season 1 uses 86 Palmeiro and twists the rest of the 86 Cubs, etc. Through 9 seasons, Palmeiro is now on his 3rd franchise (Cubs, Rangers, Orioles). Interestingly, Jamie Moyer was his teammate in real life in 6 of those 9 seasons, and each time I have used the 2002 version of Moyer. The league is 100M, with DH and average AAA. Parks stay pretty much the same year to year. Overall caliber of competition is pretty constant year to year.